In 2012, a man named Jon Watts received a phone call from powerhouse horror filmmaker Eli Roth telling him he wanted to make a movie with him. Just a few months prior, Watts had created a fake trailer called Clown featuring a man who puts on a clown suit for his kid’s birthday party, can’t take it off when the evening’s over, and eventually turns into a killer clown. Allegedly, this film which was proved to be a parody later on, was to produced and directed by Roth himself. Although Watts used Roth’s name without his permission, and Roth could have gotten easily and justifiably upset and possibly even sued, Roth surprised everyone with his reaction: He decided to lend a helping hand, and produce Watts’ feature length version of the film.

“Well, it was really good. I mean, if it was terrible I might have had a different opinion of it” Roth states jokingly. “But, it was the first moment that I realized I could be parodied, which is oddly flattering in a way. I was like ‘Wow, I’ve actually become a parody of myself, because so many people thought the trailer was real, it came out about five or six years go, so it was really before Twitter and Facebook and social media and Instagram like you couldn’t dispel it instantly, it just sort of appeared on a website and everyone thought ‘Oh my god, this is real! This is real!’ So, I called up Jon Watts, and I told him how much I loved it. I thought it was great, I thought it was really clever and funny and smart and I thought, ‘Fuck, I wish I had made that movie!’ And I said ‘Do you want to turn this into a feature?’ And he said, ‘Oh my god, thank you for not suing me!’ and I said, ‘Well this is Hollywood, let’s wait until we make money, then we can sue each other. There’s no point in suing each other now’” (laughs).

Although Watts had jumped on major hurdle, getting the help he needed from Roth to turn his short into a feature length film, he now has to deal with the obstacle every indie filmmaker must face at some point in their careers – trying to get noticed in an overly superhero saturated world.

“[Marvel and DC are] spending like, baseline is forty million, and those movies are spending sixty or eighty or sometimes a hundred million in marketing, so that’s what’s making money. There’s a new superhero movie almost every single week, and what happens is all the oxygen gets sucked up” Roth explains. “The best screens and cinemas are going to those movies, and that’s just the world we live in, and that’s just movies in 2016, that’s what movies are, so this is one of the reasons we created CryptTV. My cofounder Jack Davis and I really worked hard to cultivate and build an audience with short form original digital scares that has a very dedicated following and dedicated audience that they are there on CryptTV for that and we know we can reach them, we know we can activate them, so it’s just being smart, and so now we’re using CryptTV, mainly, because why spend all that money running a commercial on television if not necessarily everybody cares about it? Whereas, we put that trailer on CryptTV, it got 2.7 million views organically. It was like eighty thousand shares, insane insane engagement, and you could tell it’s like, ‘Okay, now we’re getting this trailer to an audience who care about this movie then we can retarget the people that saw the trailer cause we did it through facebook, now we can go back to them with more content’. So, you’re only getting the clown content to the people that care about the clown content. That’s been the goal, we’ve done marketing movies like Krampus, and stuff with The Witch and that’s the new way of reaching people is reaching them through their phones and their very like, isolated pods”.

In the end, not only has Watts seemingly effectively battled the Marvel-heavy market and won, but he’s even gone a step further and joined the ranks of Hollywood’s most elite filmmaking club – by landing the upcoming Spider-Man movie directing gig. According to Roth, this multi million dollar company couldn’t have nabbed a man better suited for the job.

“You know Jon can make anything look good on limited resources, he made [Clown] for just over a million dollars, which, it’s not an easy movie to do, and he made it look like it was shot for fifteen, so. He’s off doing Spider-Man for Marvel now, and I’m really, really happy for him, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. It’s just great when you work with a director like that where the as a producer, you can be there to help them creatively, and then let them do what they do best”.

Although holding one’s own in the face of superhero movies nowadays can be daunting, one upside that we can all agree on that the comic book cinematic universe provides is opportunities for up-and-comers like Watts and gang to flourish as filmmakers. It will be interesting to see what Watts has up his sleeve for the upcoming Spider-Man adaptation, especially because his work on Clown has been so impressive, particularly given his very limited financial resources.

Clown hits theaters and On Demand on June 17th, 2016.